My quest to turn a first house into a cozy home.

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Happy Superbowl! Hope its nicer wherever you live than it is here. Wind, sleet, and freezing temperatures have kind of dampened our spirits. Not feeling very well at all and had to stay home from work with a fever, but its nothing that greasy food and beer can’t fix I’m sure, right?!

I’ve got a short one for you today.

This is the first project that I embarked on when we arrived at the house and boy am I glad to have it out of the way. The super 90’s brass fireplace that I mentioned in my last post was beat up and sad, and looked like it wanted a facelift. After some research online, I came across what I figured was the easiest, cheapest, and most stress-free way to get a new look that I could love. SPRAY PAINT! Who knew that $7 at Home Depot could change my life?? The internets knew.

I poked around some more and determined that I loved the “ORB” look, and that I would make my weapon of choice the same can of glory that she had used.

RUST-OLEUM Universal Advanced Formula Metallic Paint & Primer in One…

Nifty graphic, eh? This stuff was AMAHZING and worked so well! Nice and easy to spray, with even application and not too much blowout. The ORB color looks EXACTLY as the top of the bottle, kind of a black with the tiniest specks of varied metallics. It dried to the touch in about 15 minutes.

I had taped scratch paper around the mantle and hearth of the fireplace, took a deep breath, and sprayed.

I think being a little nervous caused me to make a few too many spray trips across some of the larger flat surfaces, and I ended up putting WAY too much paint on.

Fortunately, the paint evened out for the most part while drying, and with some SUPER fine sand paper and touch up sprays, these drips met their doom. Learn from my mistakes people. Be confident that the coverage from this spray paint will get the job done, you don’t need to go over it a million times!

Without further ado…

(I think you can click that and make it bigger if its showing up small.)

BTW this stuff is definitely as fume-y as the bottle warns, so when spraying a fireplace indoors like this, I recommend opening all possible windows and doors.

I am saving the FULL “after” of this fireplace for when we get the surround and hearth improved in the near future thanks to some cool cheap and easy updates. Let me know if you have any ideas!

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I told you I would be posting more often! Ok don’t worry, I don’t expect you to read this EVERY day. I was feeling inspired. 😀

Since we are in the middle of a few projects right now, and I don’t have a completed start-to finish for you, I thought I would give y’all a few of my “top offenders.” That is the top 5 items on our list to fix.

I would describe our preferred style as traditional as far as home architecture goes and traditional/transitional for interiors.

Though I expected newer homes to have been built with the character of their time, I never expected a home that looked so downright traditional on the outside to be so offensive on the inside. So now we begin the task of updating our interior! Or… un-updating it? Replacing the existing finishes and fixtures to reflect a more “classic” design POV and removing the 80s/90s junk. NOTE: These projects aren’t ranked in any particular order of offensiveness, they’re all pretty bad.

WARNING… these pictures are disturbing and may be offensive to some audiences.

1. The awesomely dated brass fireplace.

This thing MAYBE wouldn’t have been so terrible if it didn’t have rusted out spots that were SO visible. A la…

As you can see, the monster is pictured here shortly before meeting its bitter end via a can of ORB (oil rubbed bronze) spray paint. More on that to come!

This is in our kitchen! And that is a chip in the laminate tile. ‘NUFF SAID.

3. The saddest entryway “chandelier” in existence.

This thing has been on my list since day 1. Its the first thing you see when you walk in, so… 😦 Also, popcorn ceilings get an honorable mention here.

4. Number four is a glorious ceiling fan. The previous owners did not see importance in putting the cord in the ceiling, so this baby’s chain is elegantly draped across the living room ceiling and down the wall to an extension cord.

It should be noted that all of the ceiling fans in the home are dated, and mismatched. This is the first one you see, and the only one with a visible power supply. Why?

5. Number five is a wall-mounted fire alarm strobe (or something completely different?) that is conspicuously centered on our living room wall. RIGHT where every person in their right mind would want to place a large piece of wall art or a painting of some sort over a sofa.

Anyone know WHAT THIS IS or how we can get rid of it? Plan at the moment is to procure a large piece of wrapped canvas art.

So there you have it! Some of the love-to-hate-it parts of our new home. We are so excited that these things are all fun changes that we can do in the near future. I feel like small changes here will make a HUGE difference, and I can’t wait to share the process!

If anyone has any suggestions or stories, please feel free to share!!

❤

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So the Holidays came and went and …. I am happy to say that after a TON of drama, we have settled into our new home! I did not want to start on the new house posts until we were actually sure that we would have one.. my bad guys -.-

I will spare you all the VERY gory details, since a post bitching about something that is (thankfully) in the past is only really interesting for .5 seconds. In a nutshell,

-We put an offer on the home and it was all good until the seller found out he had to track down a gazillion estranged family members to get permission to sell.. we pushed back closing.

-The seller tracked down said family members in record time and we were all set to close again pending a few signatures, when our lender “found out” at the last minute that a few months beforehand, FHA guidelines had changed, requiring borrowers to have been at their current place of employment for at least six months (I was at about 4 months employment at the time). We had to push the close date back another few months.

-On our way to closing last week we got a phone call saying that the Justice Department (responsible for getting closing papers to one of the seller’s estranged family members in PRISON in NEW YORK…LOL) had hung up on the title company when they called to find out why it was taking so long. We waited, and thankfully our lender and the title company were able to have us sign that day, we heard back Yesterday that the family member had signed and our loan had been funded. YAY.

SO we put in our offer in mid-late October 2013, we own our home in the very end of January 2014. Dayum! So happy it all worked out!

Now, I can share with you how happy we are to be here!

Drum roll please….

TA-DA! Yup, thats our first home. The home that we knew was ours all along. It put up a good fight, but we refused to give up and now it is ours. Thank you to everyone that got us were, we LOVE IT!

Now comes the fun stuff! I already have a qeue of projects that I have completed and photographed and am anxious to share!

More to come soon this time I promise!

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The other day we got a phone call from one of our realtors. She informed us that after a long chat with the seller of our new home’s title company, they had discovered a bump in the road. More like an entire detour. A complete re-route that we could neither have expected nor could we do anything about. Like a detour that sends you down a back road, then provides less-than-obvious signage causing wasted time, gas money, and frustration. You get it. Derailed.

They informed us that in a bizarre sequence of life events, the seller DOES NOT ACTUALLY HAVE THE RIGHT TO SELL THE HOUSE AT ALL. BAM. So there it is.

Eight days before closing, we find ourselves with half of our apartment packed up in boxes, having already given notice, and having to start from the beginning in our home search. Lets just say that we are not thrilled. Hopefully we can get some of our money back from appraisals, inspections, etc. to help out with the (at least one) extra month of rent we will have to pay at the (very much increased) month-to-month rate.

And I had a lovely “our first home” graphic all worked up too! Boo. I guess I can still use it…

[END RANT]

Everything happens for a reason, right?? Pray that we find what we are looking for before we waste any more time and money!

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Its been a little while now, and though our home purchase is still pending, I figured I’d throw something on here to keep it fresh!

As of this week, Jered and I got engaged THREE YEARS ago! WOOHOO! We never thought that we would come as far as we have in life after what feels like such a short time, but boy are we excited for what is coming next.

This picture is from that spectacular fall day, 10/10/10, back in New York when it all went down. Needless to say, Fall is much prettier up there than it is here in the DFW area. Just this past weekend it was over 90 degrees and swampy as ever. Barf.

LOTS of things have been happening around here! Paperwork, inspections, appraisals, blah blah. Any and all of you that have ever gone through this are sure to know what I’m talking about. When they say buying a house is one of the most stressful things you will ever do, they are not joking. I am finding myself prone to miniature breakdowns stemming from document lists requested by our Lender that I receive while at work. Most are labeled something like.. “We need these by the end of the day today, so that our close date is not in jeopardy.”

But we will get it worked out in the end! And everything will be great. EVERYTHING WILL BE GREAT. Jered does an excellent job of getting me through these times. He is MUCH more relaxed than I am, thank goodness.

We spent the weekend packing some boxes and painting our living room, kitchen, and parts of the bedroom back to a lovely builder’s beige. Here are some dark, grainy before and afters for your enjoyment.

Don’t ya love that green!? We were REALLY bored of beige walls after our DC apartment. The problem we ran into there was that the ceilings were just so high that you couldn’t paint them without either hiring someone or renting a giant terrifying ladder, and we were ready for neither. We will run into this problem at the new house as well, but more about that at a later date. Its funny how sentimental you can get re-painting an apartment that you were only in for a year, even with the knowledge that something better is on the horizon. Its like we never even lived here! That being said, we will certainly cherish the memories.

Thank you to everyone who wandered over and read my first post by the way! I Hope to have filled even an ounce of your daily boredom with my rambling! Feel free to give me some feedback/leave me some tales of stressful home purchases or painting stories to get us through the next NINE DAYS before closing! =p

Later y’all!

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This is my first post of my new blog! Woohoo! I have been wanting to write a blog for a while now, but never thought I had anything interesting to write about. I am excited to say that that is now changing! I now have something to write about. I’ll let you decide how interesting it is. 😉

My “little” family and I have been living in an apartment in the Northern DFW area for about a year now after being catapulted from New York to DC, and DC to Washington State, finally landing in Texas, all for work purposes. I must say there is something we miss about all of these places, but so far, we are loving it here! Except the heat. Don’t love the heat! You will undoubtedly hear more about this in the future. I apologize in advance.

Now it is finally time to settle in somewhere and we could not be MORE EXCITED. Our lease ends this October and we had just recently begun the home search. Little did we know that the search wouldn’t last long. After looking for a few weeks, and seeing maybe fifteen houses…

We put in an offer on one that we love, and it was accepted last week!!! Crazy, huh?! Now the fun stuff begins. We are in the process of getting the inspections done and finalizing financing, but after that, (praying all goes well!) I can give y’all the grand tour!

I plan this blog to be a collection of DIYs, interior design dreams, swoons, plans, and overall home-goodliness. Whatever house we end up with, creating a home is an incredible journey and I want to share it with you every step of the way! Stay tuned for an update on our home purchase! Let’s get this thing started! Thanks for reading! 🙂